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Flaming Swords and Wizards' Orbs

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When matters begin to look bleak for the weary wanderers of J. R. R. Tolkien's ''Lord of the Rings,'' they rest briefly in Lothlorien, an Elven forest of surpassing beauty. The river Nimrodel's cold waters seem to cleanse the soul, trees stand with nearly immeasurable grandeur and in the fragrant grasses grow flowers whose very names -- elanor and niphredil -- seem to speak of grace and sweetness.

For a reader who knows how many trials are yet to come, there is a poignancy to the sheltered forest's beauty; it is ancient and timeless, but also doomed. Even before the Dark Power's evil, spreading outward from Mordor, can turn Lothlorien's green leaves brown, the verdant land is colored by the melancholy of last days. And when, laden with Elven gifts, the travelers set off into the harsh, unsheltered landscape beyond the forest's borders, they gaze back, knowing it will be seen no more by mortal being.

But what neither they nor their creator could have guessed is that some version of Lothlorien would be revisited, re-created and reproduced by succeeding generations of adventurers, or that Tolkien's mid-20th-century vision of Paradise lost and Reality gained, with its wizardry, elves, orcs, lost kingdoms, dwarfs and epic battles, would itself come to haunt the world like a lost Lothlorien. The trilogy, along with Tolkien's prelude, ''The Hobbit,'' was boosted into cultdom by the counterculture of the 1960's; since then, scores of epigones have spawned the genre of fantasy fiction.

Its entries now can be seen crowding long aisles in bookstores, thousand-page volumes straining the technology of paperback binding, their jackets decorated with gleaming swords and red cloaks, dragons exhaling fire, horse-drawn carriages, wizards' orbs, battles between half-human creatures and armored warriors. ''At last, a worthy successor to Tolkien,'' a publisher's overheated proclamation might read. A recent anthology of fantasy fiction was called, ''After the King: Stories in Honor of J. R. R. Tolkien.'' And every fantasy novelist does indeed yearn to be the King's heir.

These books are, like Tolkien's, multivolume epics, as if they were compilations of an alien culture's scripture, bearing subtitles like ''Book 2 of the Malloreon'' or ''The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book 3.'' They promise esoteric knowledge and powers in their grand series titles: ''Mage Storms,'' ''Sword of Truth,'' ''Keepers of the Hidden Ways.'' And they almost all require maps and glossaries to provide guidance in their often ornately designed worlds. In fact, Tolkien spawn have mutated and regenerated so much that now a simple hobbit with hairy toes -- the hero of Tolkien's fantasy -- would seem almost quaint. There are even fantasy role-playing games like ''Dungeons and Dragons'' and card games like ''Magic: The Gathering'' and the Tolkien-estate-licensed ''Middle-Earth: The Wizards.''

But now there really may be an heir of sorts to Tolkien, in attention earned if not achievement: Robert Jordan. In his saga, ''The Wheel of Time,'' which began with ''The Eye of the World'' in 1990 and continued, most recently, with the seventh volume, ''The Crown of Swords,'' which made it onto The New York Times best-seller list as soon as it was published last summer, Mr. Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal. Five million copies of Mr. Jordan's books have been sold.

Mr. Jordan has created a universe so detailed that elaborate commentaries have developed on the Internet, news groups debate the fates of characters, sites on the World Wide Web attempt to foretell events looming in the promised eighth, ninth and tenth volume of this series. Even a reader with literary pretensions can be swept up in Mr. Jordan's narrative of magic, prophecy and battle. And given the author's almost effusive love of writing (according to the books' biographical note, he ''intends to continue until they nail shut his coffin'') and the meticulous plotting of each expansive volume, humankind may well reach its promised apocalypse before Mr. Jordan's characters do.

The thousands of pages written so far contain a multicultural compendium of peoples: a stern desert culture, a female priesthood, a serf society, a seafaring folk and governments of nobility and kings. There are small-town inns, castles and wind-driven boats. And through it all moves a messianic figure named Rand. An innocent young man, he is marked by prophecies as a figure around whom the forces of the age will battle. He is blessed -- and cursed -- with an unusual ability to ''channel'' a Power that has been strictly controlled by a female priesthood. That ability will, we are told, lead him to madness; he races against its temptations, trying to mold a political and military alliance that can join in a Last Battle against the Dark One and his minions. There are echoes of Christian and biblical iconography, allusions to the Arthurian legend and subtle invocations of other authors' fantasy worlds.

It may be unfair to Mr. Jordan to push the Tolkien comparison too far. Tolkien loved the sound and texture of language and invented one for his epic; he wanted the books to read like a translation from a lost Nordic tongue. His characters' bardic poems sound as if they had been passed on through generations, coding lost memories in song. And when he hits his truest notes, as he does when marking the passing of a glorious past, Tolkien can be heartbreaking. Mr. Jordan, though, is all dispatch; the narrative drive stops only to engage in minute description of a street, a battle, the feel of wielding the Power. There is a practical quality to these books -- their job is to tell a story -- and if sometimes the wheels of destiny turn a bit too noisily, and pasteboard romances become too overbearing, the pages still keep turning.

The Jordan books are indicative of how the Tolkien-inspired universe has changed since the 1940's, and of what the essence of its current appeal may be. After all, why should fantasy novels take place in societies that seem medieval? Why the thatched huts and stone castles, the hand-to-hand combat? Why the wizards and esoteric masters of magical power? And why has this become so distinctive a genre for the late 20th century?

Tolkien was a medieval scholar and philologist who had mastered Old English, Old Norse and Celtic languages, and he set himself the task of inventing not a literary genre but a lost language; that language would then provide the essence of a world, giving it its flavor, its myths, its conflicts. He wanted ''The Lord of the Rings'' to sound like a translation of a medieval epic romance originally written in a foreign tongue. Moreover, the spirit of the medieval romance, in Tolkien's case, also had a national significance, as the scholar Norman F. Cantor has shown. Tolkien fought in World War I and began writing his fantasies on the eve of World War II. Their world bears the marks of that experience and resonates with threats to England's heritage and the prospects of its decline.

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Indeed, that world has already fallen before the books begin; it has already lost an ancient wisdom. It is full of ruins, allusions to lost powers, reminiscences of glorious kingdoms. But it is also on the brink of still greater disaster, in which Darkness threatens a final battle. A victory will not bring a restoration but will usher in a different age -- a postwar universe -- with new laws and pains.

This is almost exactly the situation in Robert Jordan's series. And Mr. Jordan's personal history in some ways seems an American echo of Tolkien's. Mr. Jordan, who lives in South Carolina, was educated at the Citadel and fought in Vietnam, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and other honors. The books' battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the ambiguities in these novels -- the evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events -- bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to Tolkien's work. And Mr. Jordan also creates a world where a great deal of lore and knowledge is already forgotten and much that exists is badly scarred.

Tolkien and Mr. Jordan are not alone in their visions of postwar societies. The entire fantasy genre is preoccupied with the nature of nation-building and restoration, a subject that can seem far more central than the omnipresent magic and wizardry. In an often fascinating novel, ''Tigana,'' by Guy Gavriel Kay, for example, the focus is on the plots and counterplots of political revolution and court confrontations. In a series of books about a Mormonesque prophet named Alvin Maker, Orson Scott Card attempts to provide an alternative history for the United States: folk magic is as real as the demonic forces hiding out in church, state and family. In her best-selling novel ''The Mists of Avalon,'' Marion Zimmer Bradley draws on one of the touchstones of the fantasy genre -- the Arthur legend -- telling it from the point of view of its women; at stake is the destiny of Britain.

There is also some resemblance to the popular 19th-century novel, which was often concerned with the origins of nations: Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas turned to Scottish legends and the French court for their wide-ranging tales. And, as in 19th-century novels, fantasy fiction attempts to show destiny unfolding on a large scale, describing societies from high to low, from king to peasant, from clan leader to serf.

It is odd that such attempts at realism should be combined with so thorough a determination to avoid earthly history. But that is part of the genre's point and goes along with its fascination with magic. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but although technology in fantasy might seem to be an invasion of alien forces, even Tolkien has one of his hobbits see a vision of what would become of his pastoral Shire should the battles against Evil be lost: the charming old mill is replaced by red-brick buildings belching black smoke.

This is familiar, too, from the world of 19th-century Romanticism. Technology creates division, darkness and unpredictable futures; magic binds and reaches backward to lost wisdom. Magic may be lost in the looming apocalypse, but in the meantime it is the source of the world's best hopes, its received wisdom as well as its inherited danger. So it should be no surprise that fantasy fiction often indulges in contemporary pop-religion or pop politics. The genre thrives in magazines called Gnosis, Magical Blend, Renaissance and New Age. Mr. Jordan's muscular tales rely on a notion of ''channeling,'' and Ms. Bradley's vision of Camelot invokes druids, matriarchal goddess worship and astral travel. This is an odd genre, artificially ancient but almost always scented with the airs of contemporary New Ageism.

But fantasy fiction also is more somber than any New Age acolyte could be. New Age's messianism is sunny, expansive, promising an abundance of well-being. Fantasy is, at its best, somber, touched by melancholy and yearning. There is little question that after the great battles, after the apocalypse, after victory for the forces of good, the old order will begin to disintegrate: that is what happened to King Arthur's kingdom, to the Hobbit's Shire, and will probably doom Rand's world as well. Magic will fade, legends will pass; then will come the modern age we all know.

These books keep attempting to retell the story of our own pre-modern past, stripped of disease, poverty and hardship, blessed with villages and thatched huts. These early societies are already wounded, barely recollecting their own ancient heritage, and they struggle mightily against absolute Evil. But the genre's real twist is that victory itself is a defeat, for on the horizon are the forces of modernity itself. Then ordinary technology will arrive with its dark satanic mills. Nations will be formed. Earthly history will begin. And we will dwell within it.

Fantasy fiction takes place at the moment of imminent change, when all might be lost. It is medieval in atmosphere, 19th-century in its concerns, contemporary in its manners. It tells of old things anxiously clutched and new things barely formed. These novels are popular elegies at the edge of a new millennium, mourning for modernity, ersatz scriptures recounting our origins, reminding us again and again of the many Lothloriens long gone, and the many battles yet to come.

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 1996, on Page 7007060 of the National edition with the headline: Flaming Swords and Wizards' Orbs. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe